Spiritual directors help others on journey of faith

Roy Harley says the role of a spiritual director is to help people see how God is working in their lives.

The role is not, he adds, as an adviser or a therapist or a life coach.

In fact, the person, or “directee,” who comes to a spiritual director does more of the “heavy lifting,” Harley says.

“It’s a companioning,” he says. “The directee and the director are on a journey in a relationship with God. It’s one of mutual respect and unconditional regard for the well-being of the other.”

The 67-year-old Harley, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Illinois and also a permanent deacon at St. Agnes Catholic Church in Springfield, is part of the first class to complete the Chiara Center’s Spiritual Direction Training Program.

An ancient practice in Christianity that stems from at least the fifth century — but also with a deep history in Buddhism — spiritual direction is now more prevalent among regular church-goers and seekers.

That led the leadership team at Chiara Center, a retreat house on the grounds of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis motherhouse on Springfield’s northern edge, to develop an ecumenical program to instruct those giving spiritual direction. It included bringing in the Rev. Albert Haase, a Franciscan priest who has a national reputation in the field.

Sister Renita Brummer, a Franciscan sister and Chiara Center’s director, said 14 participants from around central Illinois recently completed the first two-year cohort. The class that completed the first year is full and applications are being taken for another that will start this fall.

Brummer says it’s up to newly certified spiritual directors to find their directees, in their own churches or communities — though most will put their information on an international website that lists spiritual directors in geographic regions.

“Anyone can be a spiritual director. A trained spiritual director develops special skills to assist another person on the journey,” Harley says. “They’re trained to help that person recognize the action of God in their life and respond to it.”

“Spiritual direction is helping people develop an awareness and a response to God’s grace in their lives,” says Haase, who directs the program along with Jessie Vicha, a Protestant spiritual director also from the Chicago area. “It’s not just a Catholic (practice). It’s taken off as well in the Protestant world.”

‘A spiritual mentoring’

That ecumenical approach was a draw for Amy Penne of Tuscola, who also recently finished the spiritual direction program.

Penne, an assistant professor of English at Parkland College in Champaign, has roots in the United Methodist Church, though she’s gone through the initiation program for the Catholic Church and is a practitioner of Zen Buddhism. For about 10 years, Penne, 47, has been in spiritual direction with Sister Melanie Roetker, a staff member of the Dominican-run Jubilee Farm, a 111-acre ecology and spiritual center west of Springfield.

“What drew me here in part was a new way to explore the convergences of spirituality,” says Penne, who is also a writer and is active in theater. “I knew this two-year (program) would be a strengthening process for me.”

At the most basic level, says Penne, it is “a spiritual mentoring” between the two parties, unlike a more formalized teacher-student relationship. A spiritual director may, for example, recommend a book to the directee, but the sessions aren’t designed to be purely instructive, she says.

The relevance is for the spiritual director to be present for the directee, “to listen and to let someone talk and pray,” Penne says. “Primarily in being present for someone else and letting your own baggage drop away, you get quiet in spiritual direction. It’s one way to fulfill that urge to get quiet, to get away from constant communication.

“Not everyone goes to psychological counseling or some formal clinical space. Spiritual direction is an informal, quiet place. It invites people to a sacred space to cry, to laugh, to help that person in the privilege of quiet, in the privilege of processing, of letting go of baggage.

“Everybody wants a sense of peace. You don’t get to peace if you don’t pay attention to your inner heart, your inner mind.”

Ask, listen, pray

Spiritual direction doesn’t have any exclusivity about it, Haase says, nor is it “for spiritual elitists.” Haase says folks of all stripes come to him — doctors, homemakers, elementary school teachers, even a Jewish rabbi — for spiritual direction.

For the last several centuries, most Catholics at least have received spiritual direction, Haase says, from “the box,” or confessional, the rite of penance. Since Vatican II 50 years ago, Haase says, spiritual direction has “literally come out the box” for regular Catholics.

What makes the program at the Chiara Center unique, Haase says, is that it’s ecumenical in nature. A spiritual director who is Catholic would feel comfortable mentoring a Protestant, Haase says, because “the experience of God’s grace is all the same.”

Roy Harley believes that because people are much more in tune with what’s going on in the world, “there’s a sense of frustration or impending doom or disaster. That frightens people. They’re looking for a way to come to peace with that.

“People are also much more educated today and so they’re questioning some of the doctrinaire positions of the Christian faith. That causes a real dissonance. They were taught certain things as a child and as an adult they don’t find them credible.

“The work of the spiritual director is to pray, to listen carefully and pay attention to what the directee says and to help the directee see God working in his or her life.

“We don’t do fix-its. We don’t answer questions. We mostly probe. It’s not like we give them a guide book (to solve all the problems).”

“If you want to listen to the voice of God,” Haase says, “you don’t stick your ear up in the sky. You keep your ear close to the ground and listen to your life because this is where God will be speaking.

“The process of spiritual direction is to help the directee to get more in touch with the Holy Spirit working in their lives, how God is speaking in their lives and what God is up to.”

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